Sitting on the deck of a bar in a western Pennsylvania town one summer evening sometime in the 1990s, we were introduced to Edward Klein; Klein was in town with his wife who was there to attend a high school reunion. That’s when we learned about the book about the Kennedy’s he’d been working on – one of several he’s written about the Kennedy’s since.

When we read The New York Times book review of his latest book (“If you were so inclined, you could stick it on a bumper” – Edward Klein’s Invective-Laden Obama Book), we remembered the meeting.

Because this latest book is already catching attention from supporters and detractors, you’ll find a trove of rabid Internet postings about the book and the author. A link to one of them appears at the end of this posting.

William P. O’Donnell/The New York Times

“‘The Amateur’ by Edward Klein is a book about an inept, arrogant ideologue who maintains an absurdly high opinion of his own talents even as he blatantly fails to achieve his goals. Oh, and President Obama is in this book too.

“Of course Mr. Klein does not see himself as the amateur of his title. As he announces in the very first sentence, ‘This is a reporter’s book.’ It is based on ‘dozens of four-inch-thick three-ring notebooks’ that detail interviews with ‘nearly 200 people,’ some of whom even allowed Mr. Klein to mention their names in print.

“And it is written by a man with journalistic credentials. Mr. Klein was editor of The New York Times Magazine from 1977 to 1987, although that won’t get him far with his target audience of readers looking for reasons to feel contempt for the president. He parlayed his familiarity with members of the Kennedy family into a string of maudlin books about them (‘Just Jackie: Her Private Years,’ ‘Farewell, Jackie’ and ‘The Kennedy Curse,’ among others). He has also written pulp fiction. If Mr. Klein is lucky, ‘The Obama Identity: A Novel (Or Is It?)’ (written in 2010 with John LeBoutillier) will be left out of the chatter that ‘The Amateur’ churns up.

Edward Klein – photo by Sante D’Orazio (SOURCE: The New York Times)

“Although President Obama and his advisers have, as Mr. Klein so peculiarly puts it, ‘gone to elaborate lengths to hide his dark side,’ they could not deter this seasoned pro. ‘I have learned as a journalist that if you look long enough and hard enough and carefully enough, most truths are discoverable,’ he writes. Translation: any biographical subject has bitter ex-friends and associates. And if they feel snubbed enough, they will talk. The Rev. Jeremiah Wright asserted to Mr. Klein that during the last presidential election he was offered a bribe by the Obama camp, a payoff to stop speaking in public. Mr. Wright also says that even when Mr. Obama made this request directly, he would not cooperate. Among the reasons: he had speaking engagements scheduled, a family to support and college tuitions to pay.

“Beyond resurrecting the influence of Mr. Wright, ‘The Amateur’ adds little to the record about Mr. Obama’s past. And although the book repeatedly calls him a failure and a disappointment with regard to domestic affairs, Mr. Klein has no capacity for explaining specifics. He has little to say about Obamacare beyond disapproving of it and labeling it ‘an enormously complex Rube Goldberg machine’ that was poorly presented to the public.” To continue reading this New York Times book review of “The Amateur,” click here.

ThinkProgress says Klein is a “discredited author with a history of presenting falsehoods as fact.”

Glenn Beck’s The Blaze says: New Obama Book Shocker: Kennedys and Obamas at War — Caroline Considers Obama a ‘Liar’